“WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?”

“WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?”

This was one of Richard Feynman’s favorite sayings, and lucky for him, his first wife Arlene repeated it to him often.

When he was away at Princeton, she sent him a box of pencils, each engraved in gold with the words: “RICHARD DARLING, I LOVE YOU! PUTSY.”

He was touched by the gesture, but too embarrassed to be seen using them. Not wanting them to go to waste though, he shaved the writing off one. Somehow, Arlene found out and the next day he received a letter with the following reminder:

“WHAT’S THE IDEA OF TRYING TO CUT THE NAME OFF THE PENCILS?…

Aren’t you proud of the fact that I love you?…

WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?”

“So I had to use the pencils with the names on them? What else could I do?” Feynman concluded.

In fact, when he was working on the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project, the letters going in and out of Los Alamos had to be screened by censors. There were strict rules these letters had to adhere to, and yet he and his wife were always breaking them by mentioning the censors or including trivial jokes and puzzles.

One day, the censors decided they had enough. He received the following notice:

“We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife to confine herself to ordinary letters.”

Yet instead of listening, when he visited her in person to relay the message, they came up with a code system they would use to get messages through the censors.

It was all harmless fun, so they didn’t care that they were breaking the rules. But more importantly, it marked a drastic change from the man who was once ashamed of his wife’s thoughtful gift just a year or two earlier.

And while Arlene died not long after from Hodgkin’s Disease, he never forgot that important lesson to not care what other people thought.

If there is one quality I wish everyone could have, it would be the ability to focus entirely on one’s own life. It seems to be the quality of the people I admire most.

The people who live truly fulfilled lives are all so consumed with their own ambitions that they never have the time to think about what others (outside of a select few) do or say. They live in their own worlds.

Naval Ravikant says it best when he describes life as a single-player game.

David Senra puts it more bluntly with his family saying: Mind your own business.

I suspect this is true because there are very few games worth playing in life that are zero-sum (games in which one person winning means the others are losers).

If your neighbor has a great marriage, it doesn’t ruin your chances of having one. If another writer sells a million copies, it doesn’t lower your book sales. If your friend is happy, it doesn’t mean your potential for happiness decreases.

My point isn’t that you can’t learn from others. It’s that you need to carefully consider what you do and don’t want to model from them.

Let me be clear: the advice isn’t to ignore what everyone says or thinks, but to ignore the people you don’t love, care about, or respect.

You can consider all of the things others do and say, but if those things don’t serve you, you can ignore them.

After all, you’re the only one who has to live with the consequences of 100% of your actions. So make sure they won’t slowly kill you inside.